Permanent incompleteness: Slow electricity roll-out, infrastructure practices and strategy formation in Monrovia, Liberia

Abstract

Liberia's post-war infrastructure projects are characterised by significant delays that confound the present and the future, but also occasion multiple possibilities. This paper draws on concepts from evolutionary governance theories and infrastructure planning studies to analyse how actors respond and adapt to the complexity of delayed and incomplete infrastructure. The study, using data from two neighbourhoods in Monrovia, focuses on two themes: (1) the impact of delayed and incomplete infrastructures on actors' strategies and (2) the prospects for inclusive community strategies that engage key stakeholders in a common framework. The notion of delayed infrastructure implementation/roll-out is framed as a landscape consisting of tactics and emerging strategies, of reactions and thorough analysis. Delayed roll-out, thus, unfolds as a landscape of risks and opportunities, competing strategies, collectives and commons, and the coupling of emerging collective actions to government policies and visions. This requires a reconnection with the world of policy and practical development issues, as the landscape of tactics and strategies that emerge from a particular pattern of infrastructure delays and incompleteness shapes options for policy planning and implementation. Material dependency, path dependency and path formation emerge in the process of adapting to delayed electricity infrastructure and the incompleteness thereof, with the resulting pattern constraining the future evolution of the spatial configuration of infrastructure and settlement, and the evolution of the governance configuration associated with that space. The results reflect the fact that governments cannot always be counted on to provide electricity, at least in terms of completeness.